


Safe As Houses

by DesertScribe



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Architectural Horror, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Darkfic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-15 03:38:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16054733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Sarah just wants to tell Toby an ordinary, silly bedtime story about ordinary people doing silly things like feuding with seagulls, but neither Sarah nor Toby are ordinary anymore, and story time turns dangerous for reasons that have nothing to do with the story being told.





	Safe As Houses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).



"Sarah," Toby asked with as much solemnity as a four-year-old could manage, "will you tell me a bedtime story?" He clutched the grass-stained old leather softball which he liked to play catch with with anyone he could talk into it the way he had once clutched at stolen teddy bears. Launcelot the Bear, who now spent more time in Toby's room than Sarah's without any theft necessary, sat tucked up against Toby's side like the faithful toy companion that he was.

"Of course I will," Sarah said, because Toby had already tucked himself into bed without any fuss at all, so there was no reason to deny him and plenty of time left for a story before he was supposed to be asleep. "Which one would you like me to read?" She ruffled Toby's hair affectionately. Their parents were having their weekly night out, leaving Sarah to take care of Toby. Sarah didn't mind, not anymore.

"Don't read an old one," Toby said, shaking his head. "Make up something new." As an afterthought, he eventually added, "Please?"

"Alright, but only because you asked so nicely," Sarah said, "and only if you scoot over." Toby immediately wriggled himself, his ball, and his bear to the far side of the bed, leaving plenty of room for Sarah to stretch out next to him.

Merlin the sheepdog, who was sprawled at the foot of Toby's bed, half raised his head to see what was causing the sudden quaking of the mattress. At Sarah's prodding, he shifted a few inches to make room for her feet and then went right back to sleep.

Once the siblings were both comfortably settled, Sarah glanced around Toby's room for inspiration. There was enough there to provide a beginning, and she was getting good at making the rest up as she went along. Before Toby had a chance to get impatient, she turned out the bedside light so that the fading reds and oranges of the sunset streaming in through the window were the room's only illumination, and then she launched into her tale. "Once upon a time, there was a perfectly ordinary little boy and his perfectly ordinary older sister, who lived with their parents in a perfectly ordinary house," she began. Sarah did not tell stories about magic anymore, not after having learned how real magic was and how easy it was to cause unintended consequences with careless words. That was not to say that she never discussed magic with Toby, only that she saved mentions of magic for serious discussions instead of throwing such talk around frivolously.

A truly ordinary little boy might have protested such a beginning to a bedtime story, but Toby just sighed, "That sounds nice," contentedly while settling back against his pillow and rolling his softball between his hands. The ball vanished and reappeared and vanished in ways that could not have been explained by a precocious talent for legerdemain, not with a ball that big and hands so small.

Sarah saw this but did not comment. They might have escaped the Labyrinth without either of them being turned into goblins, but that was not the same thing as either of them escaping unchanged. Magic, like glitter, could never really be cleared away once it had been let loose around a person. Sarah had seen Toby do similar things countless times before. Sometimes she did similar things herself, by accident. She didn't need to warn him not to do things like that where someone else might see, because truly ordinary people never noticed that kind of thing anyway. Instead, she ruffled his hair again to buy a little more time to think of where she wanted her story to go, laughed at his fake grumble of protest, and continued her tale.

"One day, the brother and sister were having an afternoon picnic in their back yard when a seagull flew down and stole the sister's jam sandwich. It flew to the highest branch of the tallest tree of the yard and perched up there, eating its stolen sandwich as shamelessly as you please. The sister shouted in anger, but the seagull just cackled down at her, as seagulls always do whenever people shout at them for any reason. The little brother cackled at his sister, too, because what could be funnier than seeing your sister's sandwich get stolen by a bird? He cackled so much that he didn't see the second seagull swooping down for his own jam sandwich, until it was too late. It was then that the little boy joined his sister in her declaration of war against the seagulls...."

After her ordeal in the Labyrinth, Sarah's parents noticed changes in both of their children. Toby seemed to begin to engage more with the world around him and to grow out of his habit of constant fussing and hair-trigger tantrums, and on a somewhat different level, Sarah seemed to do the same, though Robert and Karen Williams were circumspect enough to not say as much out loud. Instead, they spoke of how proud they were that she was finally growing into a mature young woman who was willing to embrace greater levels of responsibility instead of shunning them.

"...then they tried throwing rocks at the seagulls, but there were not very many rocks in the yard. The few rocks they could find were all either too big or too small, and neither the brother nor sister had very good aim. On the rare occasion a rock came close, the seagulls just flapped out of the way and landed again as if nothing had happened...."

They also completely failed to notice certain other changes. They may have shared passing remarks about how glad they were that Sarah no longer complained about not having a big enough closet, but they never noticed that the reason for that was not because Sarah had disposed of old clothes she did not wear as often as she used to or stopped buying so many new ones. No, the closet in question had simply started holding more than should have been physically possible, finding just a tiny bit more volume inside of itself without changing its outer dimensions every time Sarah added something new. Karen missed the look of fear followed by confused relief on her stepdaughter's face the first time that Sarah caught her putting freshly ironed shirts and slacks inside without being to perceive the way that the hanger bar was simultaneously straight and curving to stretch around and through slightly more than the usual three dimensions of space. She simply smiled and accepted Sarah's promise to always do her own laundry and ironing from then on as one more step towards self-sufficient adulthood.

"...and after their homemade slingshots failed, they decided to build a trap for the seagulls. First they needed to find some bait..."

Robert missed the real reason why Sarah stopped taking part in her school's drama program. He liked to believe that she had finally abandoned infatuation with the glamor of the theater in favor of career paths with a chance of providing a more reliable source of income. He never noticed that Sarah had stopped casting the correct number of shadows whenever she stood under more than three sources of light at once. Sometimes she would cast too many, sometimes too few. Even with five lightbulbs in the chandelier in their home's dining room, Robert Williams never had so much as an inkling that there was something just a little bit off about the way that light fell on his daughter. However, one of the girls who worked as a stagehand for the school plays apparently had a tiny bit of magic, no doubt passed down from some ancestor who had survived an encounter with goblins or fairies or other variety of fair folk from under the hill, in her and had noticed that strange things happened whenever anyone pointed too many spotlights at the Williams girl. She had said as much in Sarah's hearing, and that had been the end of that.

"...but the basket turned out to be too small to hold a bird that big. The seagull opened its wings and flipped the basket off without any effort at all and then went up to join its friends in the trees, stealing the last chocolate chip cookie off the plate as it went. To make matters worse, the smell of the sardines attracted even more seagulls to the yard instead of luring down the two that had stolen the jam sandwiches or the one that had knocked over the lemonade or any of the ones that had stolen the celery sticks with peanut butter and raisins and all twelve of the cookies. The brother and sister looked around the yard and saw that the entire yard was a mess and they had not gotten the chance to eat anything at all even though they had been outside for hours. Just then, they heard the noisy rattle and clank of the garage door opening to welcome their parents home. The brother and sister ran back into the house and silently agreed that the picnic had never happened and that if their parents asked about the mess and the seagulls, they would blame it all on the dog. The seagulls, all of them without so much as a feather out of place, despite the brother and sister's best efforts, continued cackling and enjoyed the best picnic they had had in ages."

The sunset had given way to full night while Sarah had spun her tale for her brother, and it was time for him to go to sleep. However, before Sarah had a chance to say, "The End," and officially bring the bedtime story to a close, there was a crash of breaking window glass from somewhere downstairs near the back of the house. Sarah and Toby both sat up, instantly alert in the near darkness. The house was large, but sound had always carried easily through it. In the past few years since the Labyrinth, sound seemed to carry even more easily than before, especially when Sarah specifically wanted to hear what was going on in some other part of it. Now, a whispered conversation between two male voices, neither of them belonging to Robert Williams, easily reached Sarah and Toby's ears, exchanging promises of easy pickings and what could be done to silence any witnesses.

They were thieves and possibly worse, and they had broken into the house while Sarah was all alone with Toby! Sarah hugged Toby against her side with one arm while she pressed her free hand against the wall behind the bed as if it would allow her to track the movements of the intruders by feel through her fingertips. In a way, it did, and the power was not even a surprise anymore. Sarah did not like what it told her. This was not a fanciful tale of battling seagulls where the highest stakes were stolen sandwiches. The danger was real, and the consequences would be permanent.

In a growing panic, Sarah cast her eyes around Toby's room, hoping to find anything that could help them, but the moonlit shadows of soft toys on the shelves and drawing taped to the walls which had provided ready inspiration for her bedtime story were less forthcoming in providing weapons or other means of defense. She couldn't even safely call the police, because the nearest telephone was down the hall in her parents' bedroom, and though the creaky old floor sometimes silenced itself to let her pass unnoticed, it did not do so reliably enough for her to trust it not to betray her now.

Sarah needed to do something, though. She felt the need to act rising within herself like a tide which threatened to drown her if she ignored it. She wanted the intruders gone, not just gone as in out of the house but gone in a way that they could never be a threat to anyone ever again. She wanted them gone. She needed them gone. She couldn't hope to get rid of them by ordinary means, but then again, it had been years since ordinary means were the only means at her disposal.

"It's going to be okay," Sarah whispered to Toby, hugging him tighter. "Whatever happens next, you're going to be okay. I promise." Then, she drew a deep breath, steeled herself for a reunion she wasn't quite ready to have, and opened her mouth. "I w--"

Before Sarah could form the word "wish," never mind the rest of the request which would call forth the Goblin King to her, the Labyrinth answered her instead, not Jareth's Labyrinth but the part which had, upon being bested by a human for the first time ever, broken a piece of itself off like a polyp from a hydra and followed its champion from the Underground back into the waking world and made itself at home around her, small at first, but growing over the years, always growing. It followed Sarah invisibly wherever she went, just as loyally as Merlin, and just like Merlin it could be roused to anger by a perceived threat to its owner.

With a deep rumbling noise, Sarah's piece of the Labyrinth, in the guise of the whole house, shook and came alive. The floor vibrated as down below walls and furniture and reality itself rearranged itself to answer Sarah's burning Want for something to make the intruders be gone, _gone_ , _**gone**_. Sarah yanked her hand away from the wall so that she would not have too much of a front row seat to what happened next. The sounds of crunching and screaming were more than enough for her taste. Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was over, and the Labyrinth began easing the walls it inhabited back into the shape of the house they had grown up in.

Sarah knew that soon there would be no sign that the intruders had ever been there, not scratch in the paint, or a carpet fiber out of place, or a blood smear on the wallpaper to mark the sudden and violent end of two human lives. She wanted to protest that she had not wanted, had not expected, had not intended for things to end the way that they had, but in her heart she knew those protests would have all been lies. The best she could do was press her hand against the wall once more, before it was too late, and whisper, "Leave the broken window," because not even thieves and possible worse deserved to completely disappear without leaving behind any trace whatsoever.

This Labyrinth was hers, and so it obeyed. With a sigh which was more of a feeling than a sound, the house settled back into itself as if nothing had ever happened aside from a single broken window.

Sarah removed her hand from the wall and shakily reached out to turn Toby's bedside light back on. Only then did she allow herself to loosen her grip on Toby. It took Toby quite a while longer to loosen his own grip on her. Sarah was perfectly fine with that.

"I'm going to need to call the police about the window, but we can't tell them what really happened," Sarah told her brother once they had both calmed down some.

"'Course not," Toby said, because he had learned that magicless people couldn't see magic that wasn't being directly done to them and therefore wouldn't believe him about it almost as soon he was old enough to be able to try to put magic into words. "Can we blame the dog? Like your story?"

Sarah glanced down to the foot of his bed where Merlin, good old loyal but magicless Merlin, had slept through the house unmaking and remaking itself around him. No one had ever believed Sarah or Toby (or their father, for that matter) whenever they tried to blame Merlin for things like stolen cupcakes or smears of mud left on the bannister, but maybe people would believe that he had scared off a couple of burglars who had broken a window to get in.

"That sounds like a great plan, Toby," Sarah said with a small but genuine smile. It was definitely a better plan than trying to convince anyone that a magical Labyrinth which had taken to wearing the house like a set of clothing had eaten intruders. "I'll go do that right now." She gave Toby one more hug and a kiss on the top of his head and then went to make good on her word.

Sarah gently trailed her fingers along the wall as she walked down the hallway to the phone in her parents' bedroom. She regretted not calling for Jareth fast enough to prevent her Labyrinth from killing the burglars, but she also suspected that an angry Goblin King might have subjected them to an even worse fate for daring to put the woman he claimed to love in danger. No, it was better that she hadn't called him just now. She had always known that she would call him again one day, this time intentionally and of her own free will rather than by accident and careless words, but she had also wanted to wait until she could do so while on somewhat more equal footing with him. Now it looked like someday she would be able to call him from far more equal footing than she had previously thought possible.

Under her fingertips, her Labyrinth thrummed to her in agreement.

Somewhere, on another plane of existence, two newly made goblins wandered an otherwise empty Labyrinth, their human memories already fading to be nothing more than a half-remembered dream. They were the first denizens of this still expanding domain. They were far from the last. After all, a growing Labyrinth sometimes got hungry and needed to be fed, and when opportunity presented itself in the form of its queen's control over it wavering, it would eat.

**The End**


End file.
